Pretty much just coming back to Quake after a long hiatus (yep, those new Machine Games levels are awesome) and getting the lay of the current source port land - seeing a lot of posts suggesting that vkQuake is no longer maintained, but that doesn't appear to be the case at all? There are still lots of commits going in to the repo: https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake/commits/master/

Anyone more familiar now how it currently compares to Ironwail, which seems to be the default recommended source port these days?

vkQuake is great, and is very much being actively developed and improved. It's my favorite Quake project because of how the team has managed to capture the retro Quake feel so well while leveraging Vulkan to get such great performance and nice modern features. Try it out!

vkQuake had a development hiatus in 2023 but development resumed in 2024.

Ah, awesome. Glad to see they resumed, I really enjoyed using it a few years back, grabbed the source and built it just before (because why not) and it looks like it still works great, it even just detects the remaster install from steam for the game data, which is neat as (apparently ironwail does this too).

Love vkQuake, was perfect for my iOS/visionOS port. VR mode is a blast.

I hope it becomes compatible with the new expansion soon, I love this source port.

Looking at the last few days of commits it looks like some work has been done specifically for compatibility with Dawn of the Machine, hopefully in the next release it will be.

Novum quit developing it for a bit, but now he and VSO update it frequently.

Is vkQuake recommended more than Ironwail? If so, why?

Haha, my question was the opposite, I see Ironwail recommended a lot, but last time I played a few years ago I used vkQuake.

My wild guess is that they're comparable then :) I asked ChatGPT about it and it told me that Ironwail has better performance, which is helpful on large, open maps whereas vkQuake offers support for custom particles and lighting / shadow effects which are absent from Ironwail.

I think that you can't go wrong with either.

unfortunately the appimage is difficult to install on Bazzite, so I'm just gonna stick with Ironwail

Being able to easily install and play on your OS definitely seems like a deciding factor.

What's hard unless maybe set the AppImage file executable (chmod +x ) ?

Both are great and best in class. Especially with the improvements in the upcoming vkQuake 1.36 which should not be too far off.

On NVIDIA and Windows, Ironwail cannot do borderless properly (that's because of the NVIDIA driver forcing fullscreen anyway) while vkquake can. Borderless is the way to go for instant Alt+TAB and Windows overlay (for example sound volume) displaying properly.

It can be mitigated in Ironwail in the NVIDIA App for ironwail.exe, changing "OpenGL/Vulkan present method" to "Prefer layered on DXGI SwapChain", but it has an impact on framerates (which should not be a problem except on very old GPUs).